Her voice was entirely gone. She told me, in the taxi going back to her
hotel, that she had not been able to speak since the time of the
bombardment at the front. Of course she had had time to get accustomed
to the idea, but I was profoundly shocked and moved.
“It’s a form of paralysis,” she whispered. “They tell me I’ll get over
it, only not to try too much. I don’t know.” She sat looking ahead of
her, her hands smoothing the gloves she had taken off, an old and
familiar trick of hers, and I tried to think what this would mean to
her. I couldn’t. She had always, to me, been a vehicle of her wonderful
voice, and now without it she seemed a sort of empty vessel, a—
“I keep wondering,” she whispered, “how Jim will feel. He cared for my
voice before he cared for me. Of course,” she added, after a pause, “it
won’t last, but—suppose it does?”
Later on I asked about Mazzari, but she did not know where he was, or
care, I gathered. She even smiled a little. “He only cared for the
singer, anyhow,” she said. “I always knew that.”
Her main, her only concern, was Jim. She went back to him again and
again, watching me wistfully as I reassured her.
“I don’t think you know how far we have drifted apart,” she said.
It was, it always had been, probably, as inevitable as fate. Now that we
know more of the mind, I can pick out one by one the milestones she had
passed, each one leading on to catastrophe, even while or because she
had buried them. Buried they had been, deep in the unconscious, which
forgets nothing, and kept down there by a violent effort of her
conscious will. But then had come the bombardment, the shock, the
temporary paralysis of her powers of resistance. . . .
The unconscious took hold. It said to her, in effect: “You have wrecked
and ruined, lost and suffered, through your voice. It is better dead.
Better dead.”